Just wanted to share an update on the stuff I overshared in this thread nearly a month ago.

It's been an incredibly long, frustrating, but successful month. Within a few days of writing that post, we took my son to the doctor and I just explained everything going on. The doctor seemed as unsure as we were whether my son was experiencing illness or anxiety, so she decided to tackle both. He got some medication for the stomach issues and we got the ball rolling on getting him into therapy.

The following few weeks were very hit-and-miss. I tried to get him to drive with me on little errands here and there throughout the week to get him out of the house, comfortable in the car, and to try to work through the fear he was experiencing. At first it would take quite a lot of convincing and sometimes I got frustrated and acted like an idiot. Eventually we got to a point where the convincing took less time and resulted in less tears (and frustration). But we are at a point where he's getting better at calming himself down and going in the car even if he's a little scared.

We still haven't made much progress with getting him in the car with his sister though. We've done a few trips to the nearby park all together, but my wife had to sit between them to calm him down. Likewise, he's still hesitant to sleep in the same room as her (they share a room for now). And again, it has nothing to do with her, aside from her overreacting to him being upset and him being upset by that. It's a vicious cycle. Honestly this is the most difficult part right now because it's making doing anything really complicated. We literally cannot do family trips anywhere without taking two vehicles. More on this later.

One of my biggest concerns in the other thread was that he was scheduled for eye surgery toward the end of the month and pre/post op appointments and the surgery itself would require a lot of driving. I'm happy to report that he handled every single car trip relating to it like a champ. And the surgery itself was a success, and recovery is going really well. Also apparently thanks to COVID, parents are no longer allowed to go back to the operating room until their child falls asleep, which we didn't realize until a few seconds before they took him back. Which was really difficult for us as parents and for him as well. He keep mentioning it and I try to talk him through and explain that we didn't know and that we're sorry, but wouldn't have let him go if we didn't know the doctor and nurses would be taking good care of him.

And he had his first therapy appointment this morning. It was just an intake appointment so the therapist could get a feel for what's going on and to get to know my son a little bit. But I feel a lot better about things than I did a month ago. I know we still have a lot of struggle and work ahead of us (he starts 1st grade next month...Getting him and his sister there is going to be interesting).

I think the next few weeks are going to be spent working on getting him and his sister together in the car more. We're already working on the bedtime issue. The last two nights we had them together in the same room to read a bedtime story together and then afterwards she slept elsewhere. Just trying to baby step our way toward solving that problem.

Lastly, I wanted to thank you all for your support and comments in the original thread. It was very helpful to be able to write everything out and get some validation, advice, etc.

Throughout my workday, I'm making changes to several components of various applications. I'm also testing different configurations in a large number of areas.

How do you keep track of the details of your day-to-day tasks? Especially if you potentially need to roll back changes.

I feel like it is way too much overhead to notate every little step. I could, but it would make my work take 2-3x as long. I also don't think recording my screen would have much benefit, as it's not easy to pinpoint when a breaking change could have been made.

Personal context: while this is software development related, I'm generally stuck in the box of no-code platforms. That means I can't simply keep a git repository with frequent commits. Additionally, this platform does not support viewing prior versions of the different components, so there's really no way to compare.

And for the pieces I am able to keep in a git repository (HTML and JavaScript snippets), that still isn't perfect because the place they are actually executed from is outside of my git repo and occasionally modified by others. But I don't expect guidance on how to predict when others change things.

What is something that's been eating at you that you haven't found the right place to share yet?

Long rants, short grumblings, and everything in between is welcome. Topics can be serious or silly.

Please specify if you do not want responses and prefer to use this as a venue to scream into the void.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

This is the second of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Piranesi.
Our next book will be Ursula le Guin the Dispossessed, around the 16th or 17th of May.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

I'm getting a new phone (OnePlus 13, not that it really matters) and I'm considering the benefits of flashing over something like LineageOs straight away rather than using the stock OS.

Normally, I expect? You'd run stock until security updates stop or something changes where you want a longer running OS, but I'm considering it because I cannot be bothered with all the bloatware they put on modern phones these days.
Plus it should save a heap of battery.

What are people's thoughts on this? Is it something you always do anyway or do you usually run stock for a while?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I am looking for a new mouse, and I am overwhelmed by the choices.

I would be grateful for recommendations.

First, will a USB 2 mouse work in a USB 3 port?

What I would like in a mouse:

1. wired
2. reasonably immune to dirt buildup causing false clicks

Thanks for any input.

Edit: Thanks for all of the replies. I read everyone. I decided to go with something cheap and basic since people told me my current mouse that does unwanted clicks is likely just worn out.

Original switch release or hd 2d?

So I have the original switch releases of I, II, and III that are based on the mobile ports. I beat one already a year or two ago and had a decent time. My question is should I play II and III as I have them or get the hd 2d remake.

I know it seems like the hd 2d remake is the obvious choice but I have some caveats. I'm a stay at home caretaker of a family member. Currently unemployed (though I'm trying to get caretaking for them as a job) so I'd have to wait and only get one of the releases as a Christmas gift and the other as a birthday gift next summer should employment not come through by then.

I know the remakes of I and III aren't out yet but based on your impressions and what III hd 2d is like.

So I'm wondering if it's worth waiting and sacrificing other potential games when I have two playable versions now.

Thoughts?

1. Announcement

The second Tildes Short Story Exchange is now open to submissions!

Everything stays the same, with one exception: the submission form now includes a field for you to inform if your story should be included in the EPUB file I will generate down the line. The purpose of the EPUB file (an ebook format) is to make the stories more convenient to read for those who use e-readers. More on that here and on item 4 of this post.

Click here for the original announcement containing more information. In case of conflicting information, this very post should be considered the most current.

2. Quick info

This is a short fiction workshop on Tildes! Anyone is welcome to post their short stories and get feedback on them. For more information, please click on the information box above or visit the introduction post.

The TSSE will feature one post on the 1st day of each month. This edition will be up until July 1st, 2025, when it will be replaced.

During that period, everyone will be free to post their short stories and their feedback at their own leisure.

3. How to submit your short story

You may use any website, blog, format, or platform to share your story!

If you are inclined to share a PDF, please also share your story in a format that is open, allowing it to be easily converted and better displayed on mobile devices such as phones, tablets, Kindles, etc. Some good formats for that are .docx, .rtf, .odt, .epub, .mobi, .txt, .md (markdown).

If you are sharing your story on something like Google Drive or Microsoft Office Online, make sure to set the appropriate permissions!

You may also use detail markdown blocks to paste your story on Tildes itself (see "Expandable sections" in the Tildes docs here).

Whatever you choose, I strongly encourage you to share your story in more than one format.

4. Example submissions

All short story submissions should be top-level comments on the TSSE posts.

I drafted below an example submission that I encourage you to use. You are not forced to follow this model—feel free to add any information you want in your submission.

Clarification on the question about having your story on the EPUB.

**Title**: My Super Cool Story  
**Word count**: 949
**Genre(s)**: Science fiction, romance  
**Expected feedback**: In this story I need feedback on story, language, everything. You can be as ruthless as you want. I can take it!  
**File or link**: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ffWEjR7qP3Gfn693cLvOaRujetl6b_5x/
**Should your story be on the EPUB?**: Yes.

**Title**: The Day My Dog Died 
**Word count**: 1500
**Genre(s)**: Drama  
**Expected feedback**: I'm really insecure about the ending. This is a very personal story—be gentle with me!  
**File or link**: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ffWEjR7qP3Gfn693cLvOaRujetl6b_5x/
**Should your story be on the EPUB?**: No.

5. How to provide feedback?

All feedback should be a direct response to short story submissions.

Feedback should always follow the guidelines put forth by the writer, but anything that is not explicitly prohibited can be understood to be allowed. There will be no strict rules on how feedback must be written, but I would suggest that everyone provide something potentially helpful to the improvement of the story. That is, of course, highly subjective.

UPDATE: This post will be active for an additional month!

I previously talked about the possibility of postponing the next post of the Tildes Short Story Exchange depending on the level of activity. That will be the case for this month. Due to reduced activity, this post will remain up and active until August 1. Hopefully, that will give everyone time to both write reviews and post their own stories! That includes myself, since I was unable to comment on any story yet.

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

So, who wants a fun rabbit hole?

The Future I Saw is a 1999 manga by mangaka Ryo Tatsuki about supposed prophetic dreams. Supposedly many of those predictions would come to pass 15 years after each dream, or else in 15 year cycles (e.g. if something didn't happen in 2001, it could happen in 2016, then 2031, etc.). Purportedly this includes the deaths of Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, and the 1995 Kobe earthquake, though those are debatable based on the fact they occurred before the manga was published. Or at least, Freddie Mercury's death was. There are currently two chapters translated and based on the foreword they were published in 1995 and 1996, and I don't know what year the Princess Diana prediction was published. I also don't think she published before the 1995 Kobe earthquake since she claimed that dream was only 15 days before.

As an extra note: she wasn't publishing the manga to spefically taut herself as a psychic or prophet. The two chapters that have been translated feel like a pretty standard example of a mangaka recounting some weird or mysterious event in their lives. In these chapters, she specifically focused on the bit about Freddie Mercury, a dream about her uncle's funeral, and a recurring dream of a woman in what she later learned to be an air raid shelter after finding it on a walk. And then the news reported a woman being found murdered there with the same clothes as her dream.

She's far from the only one who I've seen illustrate a story about a wild or creepy coincidence, I'm sure I've seen others also recount dreams that turned out to feel semi-prophetic. She just apparently had enough such stories to compile into a thematic volume, which makes sense since she apparently kept a very detailed dream journal to at least the 1970's. So lots of chances for her dreams to match up with reality.

However, some predictions that did come to pass afterwards, and the reason this manga became viral? The 2011 earthquake, and COVID.

Specifically, the cover included text on a notebook page saying "great disaster March 2011" which she added based on seeing the text in a dream shortly before the deadline. In regards to Covid, she supposedly predicted a great virus would strike the world in 2020 and peak in April, but it wouldn't be too deadly. The not deadly part was wrong... But she also predicted it would come back in 10 years even worse, so... Yeah, let's hope she's not psychic.

Now, to emphasize: a bunch of it is most likely coincidence. I've seen sources claim as many as 12 or 13 of her predictions have come true, but I can't actually find a full list of predictions to gauge the actual accuracy. The only one I can find is this Medium article, but it got the "death as a manga artist" wrong since she did retire around 2000 after publishing this volume. That said, there's definitely confirmation bias going on by people who want to believe she's psychic. She has some very avid believers. And also, again, she kept a dream journal since at least 1976. It makes sense some of those dreams would coincidentally line up with future real world events.

But it's still interesting. It feels rare to have two different big events predicted by a single source, so that adds a layer of intrigue and just a hint of "but what if...?" as you look at the other predictions. Based on the articles I've scoured, the big ones that have yet to occur are an eruption of Mt. Fuji (originally predicted for 2021, now pushed back to 2036 because of the 15 year thing), and an earthquake and tsunami in Kanagawa between June and September 2026.

The one that's currently making news and prompted this writeup: in the 2021 reprint, she predicted a major tsunami would occur in July 2025. So naturally people are saying last night's earthquake was that one. The details don't match up: she predicted the earth would crack open under the seabed between Japan and the Philippines (so the opposite side), that the waves would be worse than 2011, and people thought her descriptions of "boiling seas" indicated a volcanic eruption. But it's still an interesting coincidence that there was, indeed, an earthquake and tsunami in July 2025. And apparently that's good enough for some people to count it as an accurate prediction. Also, July isn't over yet, so uh. Who knows?

For some bonus reading if you want to dive into the rabbithole: There's a full Wikipedia page about that prediction, and the mild frenzy in the leadup to July this year. Most of the information I've shared came from various articles published just this year as a response to the growing rumors about it. That said, a lot of articles also seem to be either AI translated or maybe even AI written or researched with little human oversight, as many wrongly use male pronouns for her. I also haven't seen any articles reference the actual content of the manga beyond the big predictions, so chances are they're all regurgitating information that originally spread from a small selection of articles. So that just adds to the quagmire of iffy information available in English.

Still, like I said, it's kind of fun to look at and wonder. It's almost certainly just coincidence, but it's also the kind that leaves you wondering if maybe, just maybe...

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

I'm not sure where to bring this up and I wanted an outside perspective. This may seem like I'm doing the same thing here but I honestly just want to know if anyone has any insight. The trend in talking about is the act of creating a reddit post in the form of a question. I've seen so many posts on Reddit popup that are just questions or screenshots/pictures with a question as the title.

For instance in gaming subreddits I'll see a post with the title of something like "What do you think is the best game in X series?" And they will have a screenshot of what would be the perceived most popular game in a franchise like final fantasy or halo or something. This is only one example, I see so many questions constantly in my home feed.

Is this some kind of concerted effort to train an LLM or is it simply some unspoken advantage that karma farmers use to drive engagement? Or am I simply just diving into conspiracy theories created by my own ignorance?

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

Was listening to a pod where one person shared a funny, and having fun is taking care of your ~mental.health

This is my kind of humour, an 'article' about it: https://pleated-jeans.com/2023/08/29/disappointing-affirmations-dave-tarnowski/

And a link to the instagram account https://www.instagram.com/disappointingaffirmations/ for those who use instagram.

The episode in question: Divergent Conversations: Episode 106(mp3)

Maybe this isn't really a good topic, but maybe you'd like to share what makes you laugh, good podcasts or how you use humour for ~mental.health.

I also wrote something related in one the monthly check in topics, so maybe @chocobean would like to give an update! (Sorry for calling you out like this, just trying to have some fun)

I'm considering installing some abandonware games, and, as anyone who trawls the internet for old executables knows: they are often rife with viruses/malware.

It's easy to avoid the ones that are clearly malicious using tools like VirusTotal, but it gets trickier when the "is it clean?" is more of a "maybe" than a "no" because you're not sure if something is a false positive.

I'd rather not take chances and will generally avoid anything I find even slightly suspicious, but it did get me thinking: if I ran the games through Linux instead of Windows (e.g. via WINE or Proton), am I equally vulnerable?

Does something like that sandbox the virus? Is the virus rendered ineffective by being in a system it's unable to exploit as intended?

Or is this wishful thinking and it's still risky no matter what?

I'm not asking this as a "help me play abandonware games" plea (though, if there are best practices out there feel free to enlighten me). Instead, it's a curiosity -- a "help me better understand Linux vs. Windows" from someone who's not super techy.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I've been looking into installing air conditioning in the building that will eventually be my office and workshop. Local HVAC contractors gave me extremely large numbers as quotes. I've watched mini split installs and I'm pretty sure they're within DIY range for me. So I spent $10 and a couple of nights of reading, and took the EPA 608 type 2 certification exam today, so now (pending someone watching and approving a 20-minute video of me staring at a phone screen) I can legally install one myself for significantly cheaper.

I've also occasionally considered getting a ham radio license, solely because I like a bunch of adjacent electronics topics and it feels like the kind of thing I could be into. (So far, I haven't bothered because the vibes of the community around it don't feel right for me, but I haven't completely abandoned the idea.)

It occurs to me there are probably several more things like this that I'd never thought about. Small plane pilot's licenses are another, though those require formal training. But attempting to research this mostly returns lists of "you could be an Official Microsoft Certified Professional Excel User!". That's not what I mean.

What other useful licenses can one easily get without making it a whole career? "Useful" here means something like "having the piece of official paper grants privileges that simply learning the underlying knowledge doesn't".

As a Brit who's now effected by the Great British Firewall I'd like recommendations for VPNs that meet the following criteria either directly or via additional software/Firefox extensions:

• Use VPN only for specific apps on iOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky and Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) but not others)
• Use VPN for specific websites on Windows/macOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky, Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) websites)
• VPN considered generally trustworthy and not an American firm

Personal recommendations that you have experience with only please.

Hi everyone, I'm feeling inspired to start a tool library out of a community space. I am resisting the urge to roll the software myself and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions about existing projects that I might look into, ideally leaning towards the lightweight side of things.

What say you, Tildes community?

Belgian Grand Prix
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps
July 25-27, 2025

Grand Prix Qualifying:
Saturday, July 26, 2025 - 14:00 UTC / 10:00a US EDT

Grand Prix:
Sunday, July 27, 2025 - 13:00 UTC / 9:00a US EDT

Next race:

Hungarian Grand Prix
Hungaroring
August 1-3, 2025

Ironically, AI has boomeranged from surpassing human intelligence to having us spot it like a dove in a pond. So now, leave in all the little flubs to make it a bit more clear that a person at least typed this in a keyboard, you know?

This morning I found a receipt in my kitchen. It was from my roommate, who had ordered pizza from Dominoes the night before. When I looked at it, I was shocked. There was a single line item on the order, two large pizzas for the sum of $75.98 USD. I thought, "what the hell is this? How is he spending so much on pizza? And the junk they sell at Dominos? They don't even make the crust there!"

But then I looked down to the actual amount paid and it had a discount: $54.00 off the price for buying two of them. So the effective price was a much more reasonable $10.99 each. That's less than a third of the sticker price. After tax and an in-house delivery fee, it was still under half of that price.

I don't eat out that often, and fast food is especially rare for me, so I've been fairly insulated from this, but it seems that this kind of thing is happening everywhere. One pizza place I do get food from occasionally is Pieology. Their pizzas were roughly $10 not too long ago, but in recent years those prices have ballooned, with some locations asking for $15 for the same pizza order. But the secret is that they are actually still selling pizzas for those prices if you use their app - it's just that instead of giving you the real price, you get free "perks", which is your choice of a drink, cookie, and things to that effect. I never go to McDonalds, but I've heard endless complaining about how expensive it is. The retort I hear is, "you better get the app". The app is a privacy nightmare that requires practically every permission it could ask for in order to function, so rather than actually getting deals you're just subsidizing the cost of your food with the sale of your personal data.

There's almost no way to definitively prove this, but one argument that I find compelling as to why restaurants are doing this is because of delivery apps. Delivery apps take omission from the purchase price, and people really don't like seeing that they're paying more for things on the apps than they would be in the stores, so shops are raising the base price of their food in order to make things seem more fair, while offering in-store discounts so that they don't lose out on revenue from lower-income people who wouldn't order from delivery apps. If that's the case, that would mean that people ordering from those delivery apps are not only paying more for the privilege, but they are actively pushing up the prices for everyone else as well. And that's just ridiculous.

You were ahead of the curve, or most people thought otherwise, or somebody vehemently opposed you, etc.

But it turns out you were right.

This is your chance to share your vindication.

As always, the question is open to all answers: simple or complex; funny or serious; tiny or significant.

Can be viewed here

Is this just the usual pointless Apple fanfare?

I'm not very techy so I'm just wondering why this is a big deal. It seems to me it's just a different theme of sorts? But in this video MKBHD is making it out to be a really big deal. Is it like technologically super impressive? What's the big deal?

My wife and I are in Tokyo for a couple of days, before moving on to Kyoto. We have a few restaurants booked already, and have a friend or two in the city who will show us around, but I wanted to solicit some recommendations from people here too. We are staying in Ginza area but happy to walk/use metro to explore other parts of the city.

Any recommendations for good shopping or good food? I’m interested in vintage/second hand clothes, kitchen equipment, etc but honestly open to any suggestions of things to check out!

EDIT:

Well, I’m back stateside now, and I want to avoid bumping this thread too much by going through and thanking people, but I found all of these comments really useful! We ended up having a great time and ate some great food, most of the time by popping in places that looked good when walking by. Did some nice shopping as well (I managed to pick up my dream watch from a small store in Omote-sando!) Thanks everyone for the great recommendations, it was useful to get my bearings, and now I just can’t wait to go back.

The party tonight consisted of

• Jeff, half-elf Druid 5 / Fighter 3 / Magus* 4
• Lee, gray elf Fighter 4 / Magic-User 4 / Thief 5
• Oryn, high elf Magic-User 5 / Thief 6
  • Henchman Takeshi, human Ranger 4
• Varda, human dual-class** Cleric 6 -> Magic-User 3
  • Henchman Rudy, halfling Druid 2 / Thief 3
• Vordt, half-ogre Cleric 4 / Fighter 4
  *Magus is a custom subclass of Magic-User I created.
  **Varda intends to become an occultist, another custom class of mine; becoming one functions similarly to bard, where you begin as Cleric, transition to Magic-User, and then finally become a proper occultist.

To recap the prior session, the party went into the dungeon again and explored a new direction, finding a long hallway with bas reliefs in brass decorating the walls. Behind a set of brass double-doors was a 90' by 40' chamber with four major points of interest.

• An oblong, 4' tall x 10' wide altar with a basin filled with water and treasure.
• A fountain streaming endless water without overflowing.
• Four pillars with gargoyles atop them, unmoving.
• A drape along the south wall covering something.
  After a cursory search, Rudy set to looting the basin, which triggered the entire altar to begin rolling forward and the marine life carved into it to animate. Rudy jumped out of the way as several combatants closed in. Many attacks and spells were slung its way, and it lashed out with teeth, tentacles, and pincers as it slowly rolled to face individual combatants. As Lee was caught by the fury of the altar, the gargoyles animated and began flying in to harass the party. Though the altar was defeated, the gargoyles seemed keen on taking Takeshi out, as by the end of that round he is bleeding on the floor. Varda then invokes a chant and uses a limited wish to revive Lee and transport everyone to a safe location. As everyone blinked, they found themselves in the domicile of the two old clerics hiding out in Woodpine, sage and incense filling their noses rather than the brine of the altar chamber.

They spend a week licking their wounds and allowing the clerics to tend to them, then set out again. Oryn casts invisbility, 10' radius on the party as they leave town and travel to the Temple dungeon. They work their way back to the altar room and have an easier time clearing out the gargoyles, afterwards noticing that these appear to be zombies wearing cloaks. All but one of the cloaks were too damaged to be of any use or value, so they remove the one and continue on.

They enter a room whose main attraction is a pool with a triton in it. The triton telepathically connects with the party and pleads for assistance before a kraken is summoned through his sacrifice and they all die. Varda, through knowledge granted by their patron, is slowly becoming suspect of the situation. The triton pleads individually with several party members, attempting to suggest they enter the pool and remove his chains, unbeknownst to them; I am rolling their saves in secret and they're passing them. Lee attempts to shoot it with an arrow, and the arrow dissolves before reaching the triton.

Finally, its gaze meets with Vordt's, who was ready to leave, and he fails the save. Vordt begins removing his armor to jump into the pool. Lee (4'9" 191 lbs accounting for gear) attempts to stop Vordt (7'8" 441 lbs accounts for gear) via grappling. He gets a lucky waist cinch that is immediately broken by Vordt as he lands a knee to Lee's jaw, dealing a staggering 11 points of subdual damage to him, but he takes it like a champ as he sits out, stunned from the blow.

Jeff casts web in a wall between Vordt and the pool as they figure out how best to handle him as Oryn and Takeshi move to open the door behind them. Varda, in a desperate attempt to save Vordt, utilizes a clerical dispel magic and fails to remove the charm from Vordt. Varda then utilizes their anything item to turn it into a rope of entanglement, which then hogties Vordt.

The party drags Vordt out of the dungeon safely and regains his senses the following day, shortly before the rope returns to its original form, t hen makes the several-day journey back to town to split the loot. Varda will receive no XP this go around, but the gems the party found elsewhere amounted to the PC shares totalling about 3700 gold each. Oh, and Oryn is now partially gargoyle, as they put on that cloak I mentioned earlier and then took it off.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like dogs, artificial intelligence and ozzy osbourne. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was a nosey parker.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

I'm starting an archive project of long form interviews with locals in my area. Do any of y'all have advice on what might be the best handheld voice recorder that's high quality sound but small and discrete so my interviewees can forget that they're being recorded?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I have a prescription for a certain digestion aide which I need to take on a daily basis. A while back, I got a letter from my insurance that they will no longer be covering it and offering it through the pharmacy counter because it's an over-the-counter medication.

The problem is that almost nobody sells this drug in large quantities. I used to get a 3-month supply, 100 pills, for something less than $10. Now the best price I can seem to find is $12 for a 42-pack, and annoyingly they only ever come in incredibly irritating blister packs (a pox on the people who invented putting pills in those things!), or an equally unhinged option of being spread between three separate bottles and boxed together.

I did happen to find a place that sold the drug in bulk, but I've never heard of them and their website doesn't exactly inspire trust.

Does anyone know of a place where I might be able to find the drugs I need in quantities and packaging that makes sense, within the United States?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I was about to recommend wordpress.com (free tier) to someone and realized I have no idea if I should. I am not a tech person but I should have an idea of what to suggest when someone even less technical ask me for advice. Did it all die down? Is Wordpress safe to use now?

My (older, now) computer has started having issues with the WiFi cutting out.

I looked at the connection strength and saw it was sometimes dropping to 0, so I picked up a WiFi extender, and now it’s signal strength is usually around 70% (Windows only shows a percentage). However, even while monitoring the strength via a PowerShell script to watch the connection strength, it still drops out while the connection strength is > 70%. When it “drops out” I’ll run a speed test and see that it is basically uploading/downloading with kbps speeds instead of Mbps.

My other devices in the same room don’t seem to have any issues, so I’m wondering if my antenna or WiFi card (built in to the motherboard) are just failing.

I know PCIe WiFi cards are better, but unfortunately, as it’s an older computer (can’t even support Windows 11), the motherboard only has one PCIe slot that is in-use by the GPU.

So, any suggestions for a USB WiFi card that actually works? (Or additional ways of troubleshooting a failing wifi connection…)

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like scurvy, names.user and emoji. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was keeping the minutes.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!